12 Days of Christmas Music That Doesn’t Suck, 2014 Edition (Day 1)

Yes, it’s that time of year again. “Houston’s Official Christmas Music Station” — which has been broadcasting Christmas and winter-themed songs since the Friday night before Thanksgiving — has once more conformed to the belief that they must play the same dozen tired crap songs over and over again, with only an occasional good one thrown into the mix.

Thank goodness for my iPod.

Since this series on my blog was such a hit last year (click here to see the first post and then follow the “next post” links to see the rest), I’m doing it again! And while I’ll be sharing a lot of different stuff with you this time around, I’m going to kick things off with what is still one of my all-time favorites, “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses. Perhaps there will come a time when my life isn’t insanely busy, and then I won’t be able to relate to this song as well or enjoy it as much, but honestly, I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen.

6 thoughts on “12 Days of Christmas Music That Doesn’t Suck, 2014 Edition (Day 1)”

I love this goofy song & only heard it for the first time a few years ago. I had never seen the video before, though!
I’ve been taking solace in my iPod, as well! I have a digression about Christmas cassette tapes I would make every year (well, they were more “December” tapes, since they were just full of music I liked, borrowed or poached from the radio each December) but that’s not germane to the discussion. What I recently found in iTunes were a couple of albums I had originally listened to on record (from the library, because I am and was a huge nerd, and cheap) but had long since forgotten the names of. Fortunately some of the song titles were accurate on one of those December tapes, and I found the right albums. All this is by way of saying: medieval carols are some of the most beautiful Christmas music I’ve ever heard, and they definitely don’t suffer from over play on the radio.
That said: this one by the Waitresses always cheers me up.

To be fair, I don’t think this is the original video, but a fan-made one taken from clips of their other videos.

I used to have a cassette that someone in college had made for me — a copy of an album he had — called _A_Dulcimer_Christmas_. It was my favorite until I could no longer play it. More Renaissance than Medieval, but not too far off. So beautiful, but I never knew what some of the songs on it were, because they were all instrumental, and the guy who’d had it had gotten it from his high school music teacher, and he had no idea what some of the carols were, so his liner notes left something to be desired.

Oh, and when we were listening to this song in my car this past weekend, after listening to Hannah and me sing this song gleefully, all bouncy and dancing around, Aaron said, “Wait, you’re telling me all of that was just about hooking up with someone?”

Well, that’s a good point, from a plot structure perspective…but if she had NOT forgotten the cranberries, then she never would have had “completions and connections,” which is clearly stated as a main objective in the first verse. 😉